itch.io

I think I can help you a bit with your problem.  If you are in the game, one of the options outside of combat is "ME".  Click that, then "Encounters", then "Restrictions".   Within there, you should be able to turn off certain flags such as choking.  You can also reinforce this by changing "Goal Weights", also under the "Encounters" grouping, setting things you don't want to happen to 0% and reducing things you don't want to happen often.

From my understanding, this is a relatively new feature.  Not everything has a flag yet and certain scenes, especially involving story NPCs, can override your choices, but this should make it a bit better.  The "heal" option in the debug menu might also remove wounds, alongside reducing pain to 0 and increasing stamina to max, but I haven't tested this yet so I can't say for certain.

I have experienced a bug where every time I defeat Shay, I get the experience and money but then the battle immediately restarts with him at full health.  I've tried various methods of fighting - using only attacks, using only bombs, using a combination of the two, not letting my health fall below 100 the entire fight, etc.  Nothing prevents the fight from restarting, which means it is impossible to progress to the 2nd floor.

That does indeed seem to be the case.  I've done further testing and not encountered it on most other aspect ratios, albeit I have enough experience in coding to know niche cases are to be expected.  As a precautionary measure, it might be good to add a keybind to forcibly close the menu/shop during playtesting, but overall you've done a very good job avoiding game-breaking bugs.

It is possible to beat the demo without submitting to any enemy.  The "adventurer" class the MC has gives a single ability - defend.  If you use this ability, you heal a small amount of health, slightly reduce the damage you take before your next turn, and you will block and counterattack against any enemy grapples until your next turn.  The amorous slimes spend a turn telegraphing their grapple attack, giving you plenty of time to defend against it.

I played through the demo and found the game to be quite enjoyable, though I did encounter a major bug.  The game becomes softlocked if you try to select chimera genes when you don't have any traits to choose from.

As you progress, you can get upgrades that let you keep some of your items/money on a loss (with the final upgrade of both resulting in no loss at all), as well as gaining interest on your banked money after every successful mission, regardless of difficulty.  Some upgrades and upgrade tiers only become available after certain ranks, so if you are struggling, keep replaying the normal rank missions and upgrading where you can.

Well done thus far.  I know you have a lot planned for the future, so only thing I can suggest is perhaps some sort of quicksave function to be able to pause, close out of the game/return to the title screen, and resume or manual save slots (for those of us who want to unlock every scene and have good items/setup for multiple and don't want to keep doing new runs).

For people who want to try this game but haven't played with emulators before, I'd recommend using either VisualBoyAdvance-M or BizHawk.  Either should work fine, are open-source (so you don't have any legal worries about using or distributing them), and have versions that run on just about any OS.

I experienced much the same thing when my grandmother passed away, having to move out there for a bit to help sort things out and even taking a semester off from university (which thankfully was early enough in the semester to get a full refund on everything but textbooks).  It even led me to heavily considering just dropping out entirely.  The truth is, if it's something you want to do, it doesn't matter how long it takes or even if you take lengthy breaks.  The reward is in creating something at the end that you can be proud of.

As for motivation, that's a whole different issue.  I've found that taking scheduled breaks helps a lot with long-term production and interest.  I'm not talking about getting up to stretch in the middle of writing.  Rather, your will to work on one thing constantly will eventually dry up and you'll have all these other ideas you want to pursue, so work on a project for a few weeks or months then work on something else for a similar amount of time, almost like a television series.  You'll come back into it renewed and brimming with exciting ideas.

The game has promise, but there is a fairly obvious bug.  If you choose the kobold start, the flirt and kiss options cause the game to break.  After picking either one, the only options are Restart or Opening credits.  The "Now it's his turn!" option is missing from the list.

There is a lot of societal pressure to be outgoing and to put everything you do into the spotlight, but taking care of one's self is essential to a healthy life and healthy relationships.  Anybody who has ever felt the need to take a self-care day (whether they actually did so or not) will understand the importance of stepping away from projects and communication for a little bit.  Besides, it's been how long since you first posted Revenir on the site?  Over two years?  I think people can wait an extra few days for something of this quality.

If it wouldn't be too hard to implement, I'd like to suggest a way of seeing which Pokemon spawn in which dungeons.  Maybe visible at the start, maybe visible only after defeating that Pokemon at least once in a dungeon.  Perhaps it could even be a section in the new library.

I think foxes make good innkeepers.  Intimately familiar with current events and with their patrons.

On a slightly more serious note, I'm sure that there will be many more opportunities for other species to come into play.  There are some NPCs that you already have plans for, but for the ones chosen by poll, you can simply remove past poll winners from the options.  Regardless, I'm sure each character will turn out wonderfully regardless of species.

Rub his belly as well.  That should eventually get him aroused enough.

The game is very well made thus far, and it is nice to see that you are so responsive to questions and comments.  I was wondering if you were considering adding something to the shop akin to IQ skills, either for the entire team or for individual Pokemon.  Ones that would be particularly useful from the early games for this style of combat/gameplay would be ones like Self-Curer, All-Terrain Hiker, and Stair Sensor.  All ones that would make it less "tedious" if someone is attempting to actually get every Pokemon and level them to the maximum, for the completionists out there.

I would personally opt for a mixture of the latter two, or possibly all three.  Perhaps there is a way through exploring or after battle to recruit an enemy, but you're more or less locked out of it at the start.  Rather than needing a specific item, you need specific information about the enemy in order to build a persuasive argument towards them joining you.  This information might be gathered by contextual clues while facing the enemy in battle or observing them out of battle, could be gained by asking them directly, or perhaps you could go back to town and ask around on what that sort of enemy likes, which would also lead to the possibility of more NPC interactions even if these would be primarily dialogue.  Having information rather than specific items or specific exploration scenes would mean after you've recruited an enemy once, you can do it again without having to repeat a large portion of the overall process.

The biggest downside to this approach is that it would be a lot more complicated to implement.  You'd need to code in checks for specific interactions or have a list of stages to weigh the checks against.  It could also result in branching dialogue or interaction paths so players would still need to build their argument through a few branching dialogue/interaction options rather than automatically recruiting an enemy.

The improvements are all great, but more importantly, it is wonderful to see you so excited about the whole project.  Just remember to take a break every now and then and get the rest you deserve.